(This paper has been published in the 2020 ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games.)
Abstract:
In highly dense crowds of humans, collisions between people occur often. It is common to simulate such a crowd as one fluid-like entity (macroscopic), and not as a set of individuals (microscopic, agent-based). Agent-based simulations are preferred for lower densities because they preserve the properties of individual people. However, their collision handling is too simplistic for extreme-density crowds. Therefore, neither paradigm is ideal for all possible densities.
In this paper, we combine agent-based crowd simulation with the concept of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), a particle-based method that is popular for fluid simulation. Our combination augments the usual agent-collision handling with fluid dynamics when the crowd density is sufficiently high. A novel component of our method is a dynamic rest density per agent, which intuitively controls the crowd density that an agent is willing to accept.
Experiments show that SPH improves agent-based simulation in several ways: better stability at high densities, more intuitive control over the crowd density, and easier replication of wave-propagation effects. Our implementation can simulate tens of thousands of agents in real-time. As such, this work successfully prepares the agent-based paradigm for crowd simulation at all densities.
Video:
Details:
- Title: Extreme-Density Crowd Simulation: Combining Agents with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics
- Authors: Wouter van Toll, Cédric Braga, Barbara Solenthaler, Julien Pettré
- Download the full article: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02964064
